


Meaningless Without Memory

by Krasimer



Series: Do Not Go Gentle [16]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Doomed Timeline, EriSol - Freeform, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, M/M, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, everyone dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-21
Updated: 2015-05-21
Packaged: 2018-03-31 14:47:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3982030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Krasimer/pseuds/Krasimer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“The universe is not just matter and energy, there are a million forms of existence in the multiverse.” </p><p>― Khalid Masood</p><p>OR</p><p>The bit of the story that tells you what happened in the doomed timeline.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ==> DEAL WITH YOUR FLUSHED QUADRANT

It started with a simple sentence.

"I'm sorry about what I said, just after we started the game." she took your hands in her own, the stillness you helped her with on her face. Her eyes are tearing up, and she smiles sadly at you. "But I did mean it. I think, however, that I might mean it differently than I did before. You've grown, Eridan, and I don't think you need me anymore.

"But Eridan!" she hurries to reassure you when your face falls and you take a step back from her. In the rush to get into the game and get past the first wave of enemies in your world, your cape had been lost, so you haven't got anything to hide behind as she takes you by the cheeks and smiles at you. "It's not just you! I don't think I'm right for any quadrant. None of it feels right, not even with you. I do like you, but more in the friend way."

You heave a little, breath catching in your throat and your gills fluttering uselessly in the dry air that surrounds you. 

You've never spent nearly as much time in the water as Feferi has, but you never realized that you could miss it so much. "Fef..." you start, then swallow your words and look at her. "So it's not me?"

"Oh, no!" she giggles, the laugh that you've grown up listening to calming you. "I mean, why would it be? The only two people who would possibly be interesting to me in the terms of quadrants are you and Sollux!" she bubbles with laughter again, goes up on her toes to press a kiss to your forehead, right above the bridge of your glasses.

You can't help it.

You twitch.

"Oh, don't worry, silly." she grins at you, ear fins fluttering gently. "Not like that. I don't- That is to say...I don't think I'm interested in pailing with anyone. If any of my quadrants get filled, it will be a moirail, but I think it will be a few sweeps before any of that happens. I want some time on my own, without quadrants and without people relying so heavily on me." she's close to crying again, tears filling her eyes but not falling. "In the end, I don't think I would have made a good Empress, not when I was following the Condesce."

"You wwould havve made a great Empress, Fef. You knoww it." you grin, hands going to rest on her shoulders.  
She shakes her head, hair fluffing up in the gentle breeze that is running through your land. "Nah." she negates the thought, sighs. "I wouldn't have been that good. The system was too unstable as it was, and I would have come in and tried to change it all without understanding most of it."

You push aside her hair, press a kiss to her forehead. "I'm still gonna lovve ya." you whisper, curling a protective arm around her shoulders as you lead her away from the gate that lies behind you. "It's not gonna be quite platonic-friend just yet, but I think I can manage that." You grin down at her, laughing when she nudges a teasing elbow into your ribs. "Wwell, if you're gonna be like that..." you trail off, then lean down and lay her over your shoulder, picking her up off of the ground.

She squeals gleefully and you pat her knee as you start walking again.

 

==> BE SOLLUX CAPTOR

You are now Sollux Captor, and ever since landing on the stupid meteor, things have been weird.

The two seadwellers are watching you almost constantly and it's enough to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. You catch Feferi watching you, and she doesn't look away. Instead, she smiles, and it would be reassuring except for the fact that she is sitting at her computer alone.

Eridan isn't in sight.

Because you don't want to panic about that, you turn away and face your own computer, fixing some network problem that Karkat had bitched about. Off to your right, Tavros is sleeping on the floor, hands curled up under his head. It looks kind of like he was dumped out of his four wheeled device and left there, and then he decided to just go to sleep because fuck the other trolls.

Seriously, just fuck them.

Most of the ones you're travelling with are assholes, yourself included.

You know this, Karkat knows this, everyone knows this. Everyone on this piece of rock is either an asshole or insane, and in some cases, it's both. So many assholes, and every last one of them is depending on you to make sure that their computers keep working.

(You would put forward Vriska's name in an instant if someone asked you for an example of someone who was both.)

With a careful glance to both sides, you realize that Eridan isn't even in the room. The idea of him being somewhere you can't find him makes your digestion sac turn to ice, and you curl your hands on the edge of your desk. 

(What if he's hurt? This stupid rock is huge, it would take forever to find him.)

"FF?" you call out as you turn away from your screen again. 

In an instant, she's standing next to you, a hand on your shoulder. "Yes?" she blinks her wide eyes at you, waiting.

"Where'th ED?"

She smiles at you, then shrugs. "I don't know! He floundered off, said somefin about being away from everyone else for a little beta time. I'm shore that he's fine." when she giggles at the end of her sentence, you feel a little bit of a headache brewing. 

"Are you abtholutely thure?" you wince at your gogdamned lisp.

She stays smiling for a few seconds, then frowns slowly, like a rotting gourd. "No," she starts, both of her hands curled against her front now, clutched together. "I'm not. He's been stressed out since we got here." she takes a deep breath, and then you push your chair back and guide her into it. 

"Thit down, Princeth." you play with the ends of her hair for a few seconds, trying to calm her down. "I'm going to go find him."

You sort of jog over to the transportalizer, disappearing before anyone can say anything else about their stupid computer problems to you. Right now, finding Eridan rates a bit more important to you.

(That is a sentence that you thought you'd never think.)

Eventually, you do find him. He's down in a hard to find area, off to the side, and there's a pile of cushions that he's sitting in. It actually takes a second to realize that he's there, mostly because he's covered himself in them and taken off his shoes. The shoes are away from the pile, and there's a little bit of one of his horns sticking out.

You approach slowly, sinking to your knees near where his head has to be. "ED." you mutter, nudging the tip of his horn. He startles, but doesn't really react other than that. You tilt your head back, breathe deeply through your nose in an attempt to calm down. "C'mon ED, FF'th worried about you." his horn disappears into the pile and you sigh, reaching down to unlace your own shoes.

Might as well play by his rules if you're going this far to retrieve the dumbass.

When you slide into the pile next to him, he makes a noise that sounds somewhat like a squeak, tensing up when you put an arm around him. "I'm okay, you can go tell Fef that noww."

"What, and leave you here?" you snort, conveying the thought that it's a bad idea for your health to piss off the Empress's heir.

That gets a smile out of him. 

"I'm okay, really." he shrugs when you raise an eyebrow at him. "Fef and I ain't Moirails anymore, wwe sort of broke it off wwhen wwe got into the game." he shrugs again, then hides his face in one of the cushions. "It's a little hard, but she made a choice and I need to respect it."

"Tho thith ith your way of dealing with it." you roll your eyes, then reach up and lightly smack his forehead. "Hiding ithn't going to make it better."

"No, but it might make me a little calmer before I go out and face her." he makes a face when your hand leaves again, and he sighs, a soft little sound that has you pulling him closer. The entire situation is almost pit-

NO.

OH GOG NO.

You withdraw your hand as fast as if you'd been burned, and then you slide right the fuck out of the cushion pile. You think you yell some sort of an excuse as you snag your shoes off the floor and take off. Eridan and Pity do not go in the same sentence, do not even go in the same thought stream.

Whatever else may happen, whatever fucked up events the game throws at you, you will not develop flushed feelings for the prickly-personalitied seadweller.

(Some part of your mind betrays you because it thinks, 'We'll see about that'.)

You pause in the hallway, just long enough to pull on your shoes, and then you continue on to the computers again. When you get there, you tell Feferi that Eridan is fine, and then you throw yourself so deeply into fixing things that you don't even realize it when Kanaya whips out her fucking chainsaw and cuts Tavros's legs off.

There's a thud, off to your left, and that's when you look up. The resulting vibration shook your keyboard, made you type an 'E' instead of a 'D' in the coding that you're doing. Karkat's lying on the tiles, eyes closed and limbs splayed out.

When you realize that the scent of blood is in the air, you look around and groan, slapping a hand over your face. Pulling off your glasses so that you can do the same with the other hand and not have fingerprints on them, you silently curse whatever force has you on the damn rock in the first place. Equius, currently kneeling on the floor next to a bisected Tavros who appears to be waking up now, is attaching metal legs to the bloody stumps that Kanaya left behind. Fuck each and every moment that lead to you all being trapped together in one confined space.

(Which leads into thoughts about Jack Noir and then that somehow leads to Eridan again because fuck, even your own thinkpan is an asshole.)

Seriously, assholes. Every last one of them.

Fuck.

 

==> BE ERIDAN AMPORA

You are Eridan, why the hell do you need to become yourself?

You groan as you think that, slapping a hand against your forehead. Sollux is confusing enough, you don't need to be making a mess of your own mind in an attempt to understand where thoughts are coming from. Or why you're having them.

Seriously, what the hell.

Sollux came and found you, decided to slide into the cushions with you and then actually wrapped his arm around you. It was only for a few seconds, but it still happened, and now you're so much more confused than you were when you left the main lab. You left to calm down, to try and make your brain realize that Feferi had made her choice and it needed to shut up. You were trying to handle it in a way that didn't lead to awful.

(A part of your brain suggested killing her, and the decision you had made regarding that was to bury it so deep that the thought never saw daylight. She may have shunted you out of quadrant, but that was no reason to hurt her. You'd almost lost her friendship once, you don't want to do it again.)

But Sollux-

No. You're not going to focus on that.

Sollux though. Apparently, you're going to focus in on that because you can't get off the subject. He came and found you when you hid away and buried yourself in a pile of cushions. You had been trying to keep yourself calm and come to terms with Fef and everything that had happened. 

And so, of course, the one troll you were trying to avoid seeing right then because of possibly being flushed for him had walked in. Of course. 

Fuck.

His arm was a form of security over your waist, pulling you marginally closer to him in an already small space. If you close your eyes and remember, you can almost still feel his heat burning through your clothes. If you try to remember exactly when the flushed feelings you can feel growing stronger started, you sort of can't. It doesn't seem like there's a defined starting point, just a slowly building wave of feelings that were too red to be anything but flushed.  
Again, fuck.

Sollux Captor is the most frustrating troll that you have ever met and also the most...

You can't think of anything bad to say about him other than that he's frustrating and annoying and an asshole but also the best choice you could make. You're an asshole too, and you're glad that you can admit to that now before anything bad happened because of it.

Seadweller traditions demand that any potential matesprit be put through a slew of courting rituals.

But you're on an asteroid, hurtling through space and trying to outrun a Sprited jackass named Jack. You figure that you can dispense with traditions and just sort of...Makeout with him to give him a clue? Seriously, based on the way he ran away from you when he seemed to realize how close he was to your face, you'd say that is a safe way to go. He'd glanced at your lips, you saw the tilt of his eyes, and then he'd flushed a deep yellow and run away, shouting something about needing to fix computers.

FUCK.

 

==> BE AN ANNOYED SOLLUX CAPTOR

Fuck, yes you're annoyed.

In the corner, Vriska is bitching about not having gone God Tier, her arms crossed over her chest and her bottom lip out in a childish pout. Instead of letting her die, Tavros had healed her up with the plants around them and his knowledge of medicine that Tinkerbull had somehow passed on to him. Instead of being glad that she's not dead, she just keeps going over the story with anyone who'll turn their ear her way.

After the seventeenth telling of it, you break.

"Vrithka! Thhut the fuck up!" you snarl across the room at her, hands paused on the keyboard. "If I have to thit here and liththen to you tell that thtory one more time, I am going to choke you!"

The rest of the room goes quiet as she unfolds, her eyes narrowed and focused on you. "What did you just say to me?"

Fuck it.

You stand, pushing back from the computer you're currently working on and pushing your glasses back up your nose. "I thaid, thhut the fuck up." There's a nauseous feeling in the pit of your digestive sac, but she doesn't need to know that. She's been talking for two hours straight, putting more drama into the story than it has ever needed, and she's gotten on your last nerve.

You're already confused about the Eridan thing, you don't need to worry about her hoof beast shit as well.

"Yeah, that's what I thought I heard, pissblood." she snarls back, her upper lip curling in disgust as she looks at you. There's a moment where she flicks her one eyed gaze up and down your body and you shudder slightly at the attention. "Maybe those of us so low on the hemospectrum should shut the fuck up instead of commanding their superiors to." she hisses, stepping even closer. 

Your psionics are welling up at the corners of your eyes and in the palms of your hands. You're not worried, you can take her down if you need to.

In the space of a blink, she has her dice out, rattling them in her loosely cupped hand. "Or maybe, just maybe, you should bow down in front of me. Begging might actually spare your life here, Thollux." It's a mock of your lisp, and it makes your cheeks burn brightly with your blood color. 

You can't tell if you're upset or angry.

"Fuck off!" you hiss at her, hands clenching into fists. She still hasn't cast her dice yet, and if you don't have to defend yourself against her, you'd rather not. The voices are howling in your mind, you can't tell whose they are, only that they're afraid and dying. 

There's a streak of blue, black, and grey that dashes out in front of you.

Eridan plants his feet on the floor, Ahab's Crosshairs in his shaking hands, the barrel of it pointed at Vriska's chest. "You wwanna take a step back noww, Vvriska." he says quietly, chin held high, voice more murderous than you have ever heard it. "I wwill not hesitate to shoot you if you press me."

Her eye narrows and she tilts her head at him. "What? You think that, just because you're a Highblood, that means I'm gonna listen to you?" she snickers, taking another step forward. "You? Of all trolls I could possibly be forced to listen to? Worthless as a Highblood, worthless as a Kismesis, why would I want anything to do with you?" she laughs again, sounding truly amused as she steps closer to Eridan, her non-organic hand rises up to clench the collar of his shirt.

He doesn't move, and you sigh. "Could the two of yo-"

"Shut up, pissblood." she speaks over his shoulder, not even looking at you. "Go back to working on computers. Keeping ships running is all a psionic's good for."

The entire room goes still.

Eridan's shoulders, having fallen slightly as she focused on him, immediately draw up and go tense. "Don't say shit like that." he hisses, his head turning just enough for you to see one of his eyes. It's narrowed, like he's sighting a target. The fins on the sides of his head are flared, along with his gills, and it's the scariest that you have ever seen him look.

"Why not? It's the truth. Mindfang's journal men-" she cuts herself off with a scream. Her robotic hand is clutched tightly to her other shoulder, blood dribbling out between her fingers. Her dice scatter across the floor, useless and still when they land.

With a calming breath, Eridan steps back, looking down his nose at her. "Just because your ancestor said it, it doesn't mean it's a good idea to repeat it." he says, fingers clenched so tightly around his weapon that his knuckles are white. He's still holding the trigger down, having aligned the barrel with her shoulder and pulled, knocking her back and down. "If I evver hear you say shit like that to him again, I wwill kill you."

Her face pale, Vriska looks up at the two of you like she has no idea what's happening. Without even really thinking about it, you step closer to him, a hand on his shoulder. 

When he turns to you, hair mussed and eyes wide, you smile at him. It feels like something new, and you quietly re-categorize your feelings towards him. "Thank you." you mutter, watching the gently flutter of his fins and the violet rising in his cheeks. "However," you reach down and pull Ahab's Crosshairs from his hands, offering it back to him. "Thylladex. Now."

Eridan nods, stowing it away and smiling back at you. 

It's an odd sensation, you think as you lean closer to him, one hand somehow pressed to his cheek. Your digestive sac has never felt this trembly before. 

Karkat clears his throat and you turn on him, hissing. 

Next to you, Eridan looks ready to shoot someone else, and you can echo that sentiment. However, what he says manages to calm you down. "If you two are going to fucking make out, please go the fuck elsewhere." Karkat is hiding the lower half of his face with the collar of his sweater, gesturing at the transportalizer. "Just- Oh, fuck off." he waves a hand at you, practically dives across the room to get back to his computer station. 

Probably wants to talk to John.

You roll your eyes, then take Eridan's hand in your own. "We need to talk, fithhfathe."

Seriously, fuck your lisp.

 

==> BE A SLIGHTLY CONFUSED ERIDAN AMPORA

Yeah, you're just going to listen to that little arrowed prompt right now. It suits, why not.

If Sollux didn't know about your stupid little flushcrush before, he knows now. You shot Vriska for him, defending him on the subject of something you never cared about before. You think that maybe everyone knows about your flushcrush now, because you just did that in front of everybody. 

If it were a time before the meteor, you would have panicked about the loss of a kismesis.

As it is, your potential flush quadrant seems more important, especially when the first time he has ever smiled at you just happened. There's a dizzy whirl going on in your head, and you can't quite feel where your feet are going, you just know that you're following him. His skinny arm is reaching back, holding your hand still, and you take a moment to categorize what parts of him worry you. Distractions are the best thing when you still don't know how he feels about what you just did.

He's too thin, a lifetime of coding leaving a mark in the form of his angles being sharp and his skin being oddly pale. 

Just as you start to actually pursue that line of thinking, he stops in front of you, your nose bumping into the back of his neck. Sollux is only a few inches taller than you, but his entire body is thin and long, like a sapling tree before it has a first growth. Despite the height advantage he has over you, you still feel like protecting him, like tucking him into a pile of soft fabric and curling up with him until there's always a smile on his face and the worry around his eyes fades.

He's only six and a half sweeps old, he shouldn't be that stressed out over the state of things.

Sollux's lusus, you know from what Karkat had told you, was a mind numbingly idiotic creature, requiring a daily dose of mind honey and careful feeding. It lived on top of his hive stem, chained up so that it couldn't accidentally fall to it's death, and he'd had to feed it everyday while risking that same fall for himself. 

Even on days when his head was feeling like it was being torn apart, he'd had to go up and deal with a pissed off biclops.

You can feel the moment your pity for him grows stronger. Maybe it was just waiting the entire time, building up for the moment you would realize it was there. Your thinkpan seems to have an entire section devoted to Sollux, and you wonder what would have happened if you had gone into this with thoughts of Feferi. 

Probably nothing good.

"ED?" he asks quietly, leaning against the wall. "You going to talk to me?"

You wince, rubbing nervously at the back of your neck. "Yeah, sorry. Wwas just thinkin' about somethin'." you watch as he nods, his hands finding themselves in his pockets. "I should havve let you handle that, I'm sorry."

"Tho, you're telling me," he tilts his head, an eyebrow cocked. "That all I had to do to get you to be nithe and apologize for thomething wath to pithth Vrithka off?" 

With a hiss of breath between your teeth that makes your air sacs sting, you shrug. "I just didn't wwanna hear her say things like that about you." There's an ache in your sides and your squirm slightly as you realize that your rib gills are trying to flare defensively. "No one should get to say things about you like that, especially not her."

"ED." he says it like he's trying to catch your attention again, and you realize that's because he is. "I never thaid I didn't like it." His fingers catch your chin, and he tilts your face up the few inches it needs to be to meet his eyes. "I did. It'th jutht...Why?"

"I-" you feel the blood rushing to your cheeks, your hand wrapping around his wrist without meaning to. "I think...I mean- Sol, don't make me say it." you almost beg him, curling your head down again, his hand still on your skin. The warmth coming off of him seems to be seeping into your thinkpan, your thoughts drowsy and slow as you try to think of what to tell him that won't scare him off. 

He's already run from you once because of this sort of thing, you don't need to make it happen a second time.

"Pleathe thay it," he urges you, his ears twitching like he's listening for prey. "Pleathe?"

"You mean the wworld to me." you whisper it, feeling like a sinking ship with no way out of the wreck you're going to be. This wasn't what you were planning on, you were hoping for a bit more time to impress him, to show him that you'd changed from the awful spoiled brat that you had been. "And I couldn't stand her sayin' that to you."

"Would you have jumped in if it had been thomeone elthe?" 

With a blink, a moment of pause as you think it over, you nod. It's slow, but you nod and he seems satisfied with that. "I might not havve shot Vvriska for anyone else, but I wwould havve stopped her from calling them that sort of name." you shrug when he nods as well, a smile forming on his thin lips. It wasn't true before you were stuck on a piece of rock that was hurtling through space, but it's true now and it feels good to admit. Even without having reached God Tier, you are still the Prince of Hope, and that means that you have to keep ahold of your aspect, even when things seem grim.

"Good to know." he whispers in the seconds before his lips are pressed to yours.

Yeah, alright, so your plans of just sort of making out with him seem to be working. When you go back up to the computers, your scarf is around his neck and you're wearing his shirt. The sleeves of the shirt he's now wearing are pushed up to his elbows, revealing almost as much skin as he normally shows. 

The only one to say anything is Karkat, and Sollux flips him off, pulling out the chair next to him for you. Vriska is sitting next to no one, both of the computers on either side of her vacated, her shoulder bandaged up. Tavros probably took pity on her and did that, but even he's nowhere near her right now.

Across the room, Feferi is giving you two thumbs up, a gleefully toothy grin on her face.


	2. ==> REALIZE THAT EVERYTHING IS DOOMED

==> FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE AND THE LIVES OF EVERYONE YOU KNOW

The first thing you notice when the battle begins is that it's Jack Noir. 

Of course it's Jack fucking Noir. 

The bastard wouldn't leave you alone, especially not after he managed to break into your session and attack. The entire group you were playing with is standing at the edges of two of the lands. If you had the time, you would stop to marvel at how the aim of the game seemed to be connecting the different player's lands together to form a map.

As it is, the fucker in front of you is an immediate threat and you've already wasted enough time thinking about stupid things. 

The humans, strange pink creatures that your game somehow brought into existence, pull out various weapons. Their strife specibi are fucking ridiculous. The blue wearing human, John or something stupid like that, has a smashing device that actually looks kind of impressive except for the colors.

Fucking Zillyhoo. 

There are so many people that you would like to yell at when this is all over. That fucker is one of them. 

"Sol..." Eridan whispers, his hand slipping into yours and clutching tightly. You let him, mostly because it also comforts you a little. There are strings of what looks like Void clinging to Jack, and he's bigger than he used to be. He also seems to be glowing, and everything on him that's sharp is just growing sharper.

Fuck.

You tighten your grip on your matesprit, bring his hand to your lips and kiss the back of it. There isn't time for anything more, not with a second portal opening up really close to where Jack is. 

With a tightness in your throat that you haven't felt for almost two sweeps, you turn to Eridan and smile at him. Your symbol is still around his neck, displayed proudly and that makes your blood pusher jump in your chest. "ED-"

A crashing sound makes you jump and you put your other hand on his cheek. "I am fluthed for you in a way that ith almotht embarrathing." you whisper, pressing your forehead to his and listening to the sound of the portal opening completely. "I withh that I knew if we are going to thurvive thith, but I wanted you to hear that."

You don't add in the 'One last time' part of that sentence, but you think he hears it anyways. 

He pulls out his weapons.

You have to admit, marauder and Highblood look good on him. In his right hand is Ahab's Crosshairs, and the blue of it's casing is shining in the distorted light of what's happening behind you. In his left hand is a wand that was alchemized for him by Kanaya. Whatever the power was, whatever force he wielded be it magic or science or what the fuck ever, it needed a focus. 

The wand did the job nicely.

He grinned at you, ejected a small jar of something from his sylladex. "Kar handed this to me wweeks ago, said somefin about bein' tired of carryin' it, told me to givve it back to you when you needed it the most." he leans forward, presses a kiss to your forehead. "I'm flushed for you too, Sollux."

And then he salutes with his wand and dashes away. 

The jar in your hand feels heavier than it should be with how small it is. You know this jar, you handed it to Karkat after you entered the game. It contains all that is left of the mind honey, just enough to turn you into a destructive bomb of a troll.

You clench a hand around his symbol, anchored to your chest with a chain that matches his. A cacophonous roar hits your ears, makes you wince, and all around you the other game players seem to take it as a signal. There's a giant green monster that looks like every depiction of Death that you have ever seen, except that he's wearing a blindingly awful green coat with rapidly changing blocks of color on the edges.

There's Jack Noir, powered by the Void and larger than ever.

You twist open the jar and tilt the viscous contents down your throat, swallowing it easier than you ever thought possible. Every warning you ever gave yourself not to eat it disappears in the face of needing the burst of power it provides.

You feel the surge of power underneath your skin and you pull yourself into the air. 

Your name is SOLLUX CAPTOR, and you are not going to let anyone harm your matesprit or your friends if you can stop it.

 

==> BE THE DESCENDANT OF DUALSCAR

You are ERIDAN AMPORA, you wield the power of Ahab's Crosshairs, and there is an anger in your mind that is stronger than any other that you have ever felt.

The hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, and you grin as you look back. Sollux is in the air, blue and red psionics flaring out around him, and he looks beautiful. He looks strong, more capable of taking care of himself than any of the other trolls that you know. He follows as the entire group runs forward, and his presence is the only thing you focus on for a moment besides the thud of your feet against the ground.

Ahead of you is Karkat, a scythe in each hand as he rolls his shoulders and tries to calm his breathing. 

"Don't bother gettin' calm, Kar." you tell him, a grin on your face that you know he would call shit eating if he saw it. "Got a fight ahead of us, might as wwell use yer anger." you grin even more as he snarls, twists around to cut something that seems to be made of shadows down. It hits heavily, undefined limbs sprawled, and it doesn't move again.

"WATCH YOUR FUCKING BACK!" He screams at you, gestures in time for you to turn on your heel and blast something away.   
The sweep and a half that passed with the entire group on the asteroid left you as more than the disjointed, bickering wigglers that you started out as, every last one of you grew, became something more than what you started as. You, personally, have become much better at strifing. 

Feferi had eventually settled with Sollux in her moirail quadrant, you had settled with him in your flushed quadrant, everyone else had gone through a period of crazy interpersonal relationships that you hate thinking about. You are not Nepeta.

She's off to your left, her claws bigger and more dangerous than they had been when the journey started.

The grin on your face as you think you might actually stand a chance in this fight is the one that Sollux would call blinding. He would run his fingers across your skin and he would kiss you and he would call you blinding and brilliant and all sorts of words that his speech patterns had picked up since meeting Rose and his friendship with Kanaya. Ever since the two of them had gotten together and he had strengthened his relations with Karkat, the four of them could usually be found in the library, with Feferi joining in more often than not.

 

It's only when you're lying on the ground, one of your horns damaged and aching, that you realize that your life means almost nothing. You're dying, the world around you is falling to pieces, and Sollux is leaned against you, his entire body shaking as he tries to breathe. The human that Karkat was so fond of is nearby, his face bloodied and almost unrecognizable. 

He isn't moving, his God Tier hood is wrapped around his throat.

"Hey Sol?" you manage to speak, clearing your throat over and over again, trying to remove the clotting blood. Your gills are struggling to work, and you can feel them moving weakly.

Sollux shifts slightly, his claws dig into your leg, and you huff out a laugh. "Yeah?"

"Flushed fer you." you grunt as something in your chest twinges. When you look down, you see that one of your ribs is protruding, a gush of your violet blood marking the damage. 

"Fluthhed for yo..." he starts to reply, only for his words to trail off as his entire body goes still. 

You let your eyes close and you stop fighting to stay awake. If it doesn't matter, if he's already dead, then you don't want to be awake. You don't want to be alive without him. A splash of something across your face makes you jolt, your entire body screaming at you as a result. From the warmth of the liquid on your skin, quickly fading, you have to say that it's either Aradia or Tavros meeting Death.

With shaking hands, you reach for Sollux's head. Like yours, one of his horns is broken, snapped off under a blow from one of Jack Noir's claws. The void powered maniac had swiped at the flying annoyance and your matesprit had died from it.   
Death himself had pulled one of yours apart by slipping his claws into the middle when you got close, a tight grip more than enough pressure to split it. Every last part of you aches and you welcome the blackness that rushes up behind your eyes.

Your life means nothing here, not in this instance of it.

This isn't the Alpha timeline.

It was never going to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...Sorry? 
> 
> If you've been reading this story, you knew this was coming.

**Author's Note:**

> Here is the doomed timeline bit of the story. I am sorry it took so long to post this, but I kept tweaking it.


End file.
